• At Friday’s Park(ing) Day display at the Seattle Art Museum, a videographer from a Chinese-language cable access show tapes an interview using a Flip-like digital video cam, a mini spotlight, and a small Steadicam-like camera stabilizer.
• Former P-I book critic John Marshall is still unemployed, and writes for the Atlantic about receiving his final unemployment check.
• The Jo-Ann Fabric store in Olympia has a Halloween crafts section. It recently had a bat in it. A real bat. With rabies.
• A survey co-sponsored by Microsoft’s MSN.com named Seattle North America’s sixth worst-dressed city. Vancouver was #3; the top spot went to Orlando.
• Seahawks fans this Sunday will not only face a formidable opponent on the field (the dreaded Steelers) but also extreme frisking.
• Another gay/lesbian event, another would-be censorious program printer.
• Pierce County: Now with 35 percent less transit.
• Netflix: Now with higher prices and 1 million fewer customers.
• The corruption investigation against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his inner circle turns out to have begun with comments to blog posts.
• Why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a Barbie Video Girl doll with “a video camera embedded in her chest”? You could use it to reenact the cult film Double Agent 73!

(Remember, my big book shindig is one week from today (Sept. 24). See the top of this page for all pertinent details.)

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

Radiohead.

For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.

So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?

They come out with that most modern of media products.

A newspaper.

Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)

This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Yes, I still mourn it.

I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.

I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.

The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.

It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).

What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.

PI.com needs to find its next level.

With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.

But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.

This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.

This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.

Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.

Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.

I recently posted a link to marketing guru Garland Pollard’s list of  “brands to bring back.”

Now, the local angle on missing brands.

Pollard’s blog has praised Seattle’s Major League Soccer franchise for wisely keeping the beloved Sounders name.

He’s scolded the retailer formerly known as Federated Department Stores for trashing its beloved regional store names, including The Bon Marche. He’s suggested bringing those back at least in some capacity.

And when the Post-Intelligencer folded as a print daily, Pollard suggested things Hearst bigwigs could do to keep the P-I brand active, beyond a mere Web presence, such as a weekly print paper or magazine. I think that’s still a good idea.

I, of course, have my own faves I’d like brought back:

• If it can ever be determined who (if anyone) owns the trademark rights to Frederick & Nelson, I’d love to see a new store with that storied name. It needn’t be a full line department store. It could just be a quality family clothing store plus a cosmetics counter and a tea room.
• The Rainier and Olympia beer brands currently live in vestigial form, owned by the Pabst marketing company and made by Miller in LA. It’s time they were brought home, perhaps contract-brewed by one or more local microbrewers.
• With Sound Northwest merged out of existence, the region could use a print music mag again. Why not resurrect The Rocket? I can just see gleefully overdesigned cover portraits of today’s Seattle “beard bands.”
• Someone, somewhere, has the bulk of the exhibits from the Jones Fantastic Museum, the beloved carny attraction that used to reside in what’s now the Seattle Center House.
• Heck, for that matter let’s find a place somewhere in town to put up a new Fun Forest. I suggest the former Frederick Cadillac/Teatro ZinZanni block in Belltown, where two humungous condo towers were supposed to rise up before the housing market fell down.
• Speaking of Belltown, this town still needs a restaurant/lounge as fun, as welcoming, and as classlessly classy as the Dog House.
• Compared to most of these fantasized revivals, there’s actually some practical hope for a new Sonics franchise. The money and the management are in place. I’m certain a re-enlarged arena can be conceived with a minimal govt. investment. This leaves only two obstacles—David Stern and the current team owners at whose bidding he serves.

As I promised a week or so ago, here’s some of what I would do to improve SeattlePI.com.

But first, the answer to “why bother?”

This town needs a primary news source that isn’t the increasingly Foxified Seattle Times.

The local TV newscasts and their affiliated Web sites, themselves shrinking and mayhem-centric, are no substitute. Neither is the feature-oriented KUOW. Neither are the small and scrappy Publicola and Crosscut. Barring some new entrepreneurial venture, that leaves PI.com.

As I wrote, that site’s coverage has steadily improved since its inauspicious start as a standalone entity one year go. But it still has a ways to go.

First, the easy improvements:

• The home page could become more punchy, less cluttered. The “above the fold” portion, which you see immediately upon logging in, could take on a more Huffington Post tabloidy appearance, emphasizing one to four major “cover stories.”
• The Local index page needs to be particularly de-cluttered. It should be the alternate point-of-entry for readers looking for a summary of what important’s gone on in town lately. That means, among other things, taking out the sports headlines (the site already has a separate Sports index page).
• The sidebar box hawking links to “Special Reports” mostly hypes creaky old stories from the print Post-Intelligencer. It’s particularly annoying to see the link to “JOA Update,” which concerned the deal with the SeaTimes that ultimately failed to keep the print P-I alive. Either drop this box from the sidebar or create some new special reports to promote in it.
• Bring on more freelance and part-time “content providers.” Unpaid bloggers are fine for what they’re able to do. But for key subject areas that can really increase a site’s page views, you need people who can afford the time for research and legwork.
• PI.com’s biggest initial mistake was to not include local arts-and-entertainment coverage, a proven audience builder. They’re starting to rectify this. They can do more, by adding paid freelance reviewers, then building those into staff positions as they steadily increase the site’s overall hits.

Now for the hard part:

• PI.com needs to convince Hearst management to let it hire more full-time staff. The site’s still losing money (apparently); but from all accounts it’s on track to turn a profit once the online ad market rebounds, or when additional revenue streams (i.e., an iPad newspaper) become feasible. It can become THE place to go in this region for breaking news, politics, long-form feature writing, sports commentary, and A&E recommendations. But for that, it needs to have at least twice the in-house produced content that it’s now got.

When I return to this topic in a few days, I’ll talk about how a lean startup venture could help fill some of these holes in the local info-scape.

Just got back from the SeattlePI.com one-year anniversary party. The Crocodile was all done up with pastel pink and blue “baby color” balloons. (The Seattle Weekly anniversary parties I’ve been to were all festooned with black, white, and red balloons, as in “black and white and re(a)d all over.”)

The first song by the first band on stage included the repeated refrain, “I want to dance on your grave.”

With the prominent exception of David Horsey, most of the 120 or so people there were well under 40, nay under 30. They were significantly younger, on the average, than the people I’d seen at any of the P-I memorial gatherings over the previous year (of which there were at least three). They weren’t about mourning the dying old media. They were about celebrating the shiny new media (or at least celebrating this particular new-media venture’s survival in-this-economic-climate etc.).

I don’t need to rant about PI.com’s shortcomings. Its own people know about them. They’re scrambling to put out a popular site on a skeletal budget. I remember the early months of The Stranger, and that venture also was then heavy on proven circulation-building features, light on hard news.

What I can do, and will do, is suggest how PI.com or someone else can help fill the big holes that still exist in local news coverage.

Our pals at Seattle PostGlobe, one of the nonprofit online ventures started by Post-Intelligencer vets, have their own view of the still gaping hole left in this city by the print P-I’s demise.

Today, or yesterday, or the day before (however you wish to count it) is the one-year anniversary of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s disappearance from area newsstands and vending boxes and doorsteps. The final edition was edited on 3/16/09 and distributed on 3/17/09.

That made 3/18/09 the first day since the print P-I stopped. That’s why tonight, 3/18/10, is the one-year anniversary of seattlepi.com as a stand-alone Web site. The site’s “producers” (they were careful to avoid Newspaper Guild-recognized job titles) are holding what they bill as an evening of celebration at the Crocodile.

It’ll still seem like a wake to me.

PI.com officials say the site now gets as many “hits” and readers as it did when it had a newspaper feeding it content. They’ve scraped and scrambled to get to that level, using every trick in the old Hearst playbook–canned gossip items, comics, cute animal pictures, fashion pictures, basically all the soft sides of Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr.’s old circulation-building formula. (The hard side of that formula, the scandals and exposés, would require more person-hours of research than the site’s minimal staff can muster.)

Most days, there’s at least one significant local news story on the site. Its sports commentary and tech-biz coverage have steadily improved. Local entertainment coverage disappeared from the site altogether when it went web-only; now at least there’s some.

The site’s design is still too cluttered, but it’s better than it was.

But it’s not the depth-and-breadth news source that the print P-I had been at its best, and that today’s Seattle Times sometimes tries, but usually fails, to be.

To become that, PI.com would need to bulk up from its current 20-person core staff to at least double that.

Even if online advertising rebounds from the current all-around business slump, it’s unlikely to generate enough revenue to support that. (PI.com, from all accounts, is inching toward profitability as is.)

It’ll need some other, or additional, revenue model.  (An iPad paper? A print weekly?)

Until then, or until some other new venture or set of ventures shows up, Seattle’s information landscape will still have a P-I sized hole needing to be filled.

Just saw It’s Not In the P-I, the “living newspaper” stage revue at North Seattle Community College (one of my alma maters), co-written by some former Post-Intelligencer newsies.

Well acted and well paced, it’s a quick succession of sketches and running gags featuring wacky F-bombing reporters, clueless bosses, and all your funny newsroom anecdote-type material.

It contained no new insights as to why big newspapers are failing, and no overt ideas about what to replace them with.

But since every well-made satire reveals its alternative ideal world within the aesthetic of its work, one can surmise what the playwrights would like: Something personal, human-scale, telling people’s stories with emotion and frankly admitted bias, unencumbered by corporate restraint.

In short, something more like Seattle’s fringe theater tradition.

An Atlantic writer has visited Seattle and talked to several former Post-Intelligencer staffers, including one who went from writing about dive bars to co-owning one (the fabulous Streamline on lower Queen Anne).

I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

• Joel Connelly doesn’t like the idea of still more street construction in Belltown, worrying that all these closed lanes and parking spaces could fatally disrupt business, especially if Nickels’s “park boulevard” idea (reducing Bell Street to one lane of traffic and plaza-izing the rest) goes through. I believe if Bell’s gonna be revamped, it might as well be done now, while all this other work is already going on on or near it.
• Our favorite expert on the domestic automotive collapse, Michael Moore, says good riddance to the old General Motors. (Say, since we the U.S. taxpayers now own the company, let’s bring back the Geo! And let’s make us some of those hi-speed passenger trains, too, OK?)
• As the Chase-ification of Washington Mutual nears completion, a lot of WaMu ATM cards have stopped working. The possible culprit: Chase’s deal to switch WaMu’s debit card handling services from MasterCard to Visa.
• Seattle Business Monthly depicts the Seattle Times-owning Blethen family as a dysfunctional clan worthy of soap-opera depiction.
• Our pals at the local news site PubliCola have some real investment behind them now, thanks to Greg Smith, the real estate developer who almost ran for mayor this year. Yeah, he almost ran against Greg Nickels, for whom PubliCola cofounder Sandeep Kaushik now does campaign PR.
• And the equally fine folks at another local news site, Seattle PostGlobe, have published another photo essay by yr. intrepid c’r’s’p’n’d’t. It’s all about the demise of the Summit K-12 alternative public school.

…new news site is now up, christened Seattle PostGlobe. It’s as unassuming at its start as the rump relic of the official P-I site. Let’s hope both grow and blossom.

Joseph Tartakoff offers another look at the Post-Intelligencer‘s final days; while Alan Mutter observes Seattlepi.com’s instant startup as a stand-alone site.